The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package !!

While doing solution deployment was hit upon with an error message :
"The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package".


After several attempts to figure out what was going wrong, noticed that the package size was getting limited to 1400 KB irrespective of wether I removed or added several files.

Could overcome this by adding following lines (thanks to this ref) at the start of cab.ddf file.

.Set CabinetFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderSizeThreshold=0
.Set MaxCabinetSize=0
.Set MaxDiskFileCount=0
.Set MaxDiskSize=0

This removes the file size limitations.